The Drunken Forest

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘It’s far too coarse, even when we chop it up finely,’ I said; ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to prepare it in much the same way as his mother used to.’

  ‘How’s that?’ asked Jacquie with interest.

  ‘Well, they regurgitate a mass of semi-digested leaf for the young, so that it’s soft and pulp-like.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that we should try that?’ inquired Jacquie suspiciously.

  ‘No, no. Only I think that the nearest we can get to it is to offer him chewed spinach.’

  ‘Oh, well, rather you than me,’ said my wife gaily.

  ‘But that’s just the trouble,’ I explained; ‘I smoke, and I don’t think he’d care to have a mixture of spinach and nicotine.’

  ‘In other words, as I don’t smoke, I suppose you want me to chew it?’

  ‘That’s the general idea.’

  ‘If anyone had told me,’ said Jacquie, plaintively, ‘that when I married you I should have to spend my spare time chewing spinach for birds, I would never have believed them.’

  ‘It’s for the good of the cause,’ I pointed out.

  ‘In fact,’ she continued darkly, ignoring my remark, ‘if anyone had told me that, and I’d believed them, I don’t think I would have married you.’

  She picked up a large plate of spinach, gave me a cold look, and took it off to a quiet corner to chew. During the time we had Eggbert he got through a lot of spinach, all of which Jacquie chewed for him with monotonous persistence of one of the larger ungulates. At the end she calculated she had masticated something in the region of a hundredweight or so of leaves. Even today, spinach is not among her favourite vegetables.

  Shortly after the arrival of Eggbert and his brethren we received a pair of animals which soon became known as the Terrible Twins. They were a pair of large and very corpulent hairy armadillos. Both of them were nearly identical in size and girth and, we soon discovered, in habits. As they were both female, one could quite easily have supposed that they were sisters from the same litter, except for the fact that while one was caught a stone’s throw away from Los Ingleses, the other was sent over from a neighbouring estancia several miles away. The Twins were housed in a cage with a special sleeping compartment. It had originally been designed to accommodate one large armadillo, but owing to a housing shortage when they arrived, we were forced to put them both in the one cage. As it happened, since they were not quite fully grown, they fitted in very snugly. Their two pleasures in life were food and sleep, neither of which they could apparently get enough of. In their sleeping compartment they would lie on their backs, head to tail, their great pink and wrinkled tummies bulging and deflating as they breathed stertorously, their paws twitching and quivering. Once they were asleep, it seemed that nothing on earth would wake them. You could bang on the box, shout through the bars, open the bedroom door, and, holding your breath (for the Twins had a powerful scent all their own), poke these obese stomachs, pinch their paws, or flick their tails, but still they slumbered as though they were both in a deep hypnotic trance. Then, under the impression that nothing short of a world catastrophe would shake them into consciousness, you would fill a tin tray high with the revolting mixture they liked, and proceed to insert it into the outside portion of the cage. However delicately you performed this operation, however careful you were to make sure the silence was not broken by the slightest sound, no sooner had you got the dish and your hand inside the door than from the bedroom would come a noise like a sea-serpent demolishing a woodshed with its tail. This was the Twins tumbling and struggling to get upright – to get to action stations, as it were. That was the warning to drop the plate and remove your hand with all speed, for within a split second the armadillos would burst from their bedroom door, like cannon-balls, skid wildly across the cage, shoulder to shoulder, in the manner of a couple of Rugby players fighting for the ball, grunting with the effort. They would hit the tin (and your hand if it was still there) amidships, and the armadillos and tin would end in the far corner in a tangled heap, and a tidal wave of chopped banana, milk, raw egg and minced meat would splash against the wall, and then rebound to settle like a glutinous shawl over the Twins’ grey backs. They would stand there, giving satisfied squeaks and grunts, licking the food as it trickled down their shells, occasionally going into a scrum in the corner over some choice bit of fruit or meat which had just given up the unequal contest with gravity and descended suddenly from the ceiling. Watching them standing knee-deep in that tide of food, you might think that it was impossible for two animals to get through such a quantity of vitamin and protein. Yet within half an hour the cage would be spotless, licked clean even to the least splashes on the ceiling, which they had to stand on their hind legs to reach. And the Twins themselves would be in their odoriferous boudoir, on their backs, head to tail, deeply and noisily asleep. Eventually, owing to this health-giving diet, the Twins increased their girth to such an extent that they could only just manage to get through the bedroom door, leaving about a millimetre’s clearance all round. I was contemplating some drastic structural alterations when I found that one of the Twins had discovered the way to utilize this middle-age spread to her advantage. Instead of sleeping lengthwise in the bedroom, as she used to do, she now started to sleep across it, the right way up, with her head pointing towards the door. As soon as the first faint sound or smell of food reached her, she would shoot across the intervening space, before her companion could even get the right way up, and then, when halfway through the door, she would hunch her back and become wedged there as firmly as a cork in a bottle. Then, taking her time, she would reach out a claw, hook the food-pan into position, and proceed to browse dreamily, if not altogether quietly, in the depths, while in the bedroom, her frantic relative squealed and snorted and scrabbled ineffectually at the well-corseted and impervious behind.

  The hairy armadillo is the vulture of the Argentine pampa. Low-slung, armoured against most forms of attack, he trots through the moonlit grass like a miniature tank, and nearly everything is grist to his mill. He will eat fruit and vegetables, but failing those he is quite happy with a bird’s nest containing eggs or young; a light snack of young mice; or even a snake, should he happen to meet one. But what attracts the armadillo, as a magnet attracts steel filings, is a nice juicy rotten carcase. In Argentina, where distances and herds are so great, it often happens that a sick or elderly cow will die, and its body will lie out in the grasslands unnoticed, the sun ripening it until its scent is wafted far and wide, and the humming of flies sounds like a swarm of bees. When this smell reaches the nose of a foraging armadillo it is an invitation to a banquet. Leaving his burrow, he scuffles along until he reaches the delectable feast: the vast, maggot-ridden dish lying in the grass. Then, having filled himself on a mixture of rotten meat and maggots, he cannot bring himself to leave the carcase when there is still so much nourishment left on it, so he proceeds to burrow under it. Here he ponders and sleeps his first course off until the pangs of hunger assail him once again. Then all he has to do is to scramble to the top of his burrow, stick out his head and there he is, so to speak, right in the middle of dinner. An armadillo will very rarely leave a carcase until the last shreds of meat have been stripped from the already bleaching bones. Then, sighing the happy sigh of an animal that is replete, he will return home, to wait hopefully for the next fatality among the cattle or sheep. Yet, despite its depraved tastes, the armadillo is considered excellent eating, the flesh tasting mid-way between veal and sucking pig. He is frequently caught by the peons on the estancia and kept in a barrelful of mud, being fattened up until he is ready for the pot. Now, it may be considered rather disgusting that anyone should eat a creature with such a low taste in carrion, but, on the other hand, pigs have some pretty revolting feeding habits, while the feeding habits of plaice and dabs would, I’ve no doubt, leave most ghouls feeling queasy.

  There was another inhabitant of the pampa, with habits as
charming as the armadillos’ were revolting, but I was never privileged to meet it. This was the viscacha, a rodent about the size of a cairn terrier, and with the same sort of low-slung body. They have rather rabbit-like faces, decorated with a band of black fur running from the nose along the cheek under the eyes. Beneath this band is another one, in greyish-white, and beneath this again is another black one, so the viscacha gives the impression that he had once decided to disguise himself as a zebra, but had tired of the idea when half-way through the alterations. They live in colonies of up to forty, in vast subterranean warrens known as vizcacheras.

  Viscachas are the Bohemian artists of the pampa. They are very free and easy in their ways, and their massive underground community warrens are generally filled with an assortment of friends who have moved in. Burrowing owls dig small flatlets in the side of the viscacha’s hallway. Snakes sometimes take up residence in the disused portions of the nest – presumably the viscacha’s equivalent of the attic. If the viscachas enlarge their residence and several tunnels fall into disuse, a species of swallow immediately moves in. So many a vizcachera contained an odder assortment of types than most Bloomsbury boarding-houses. Providing these lodgers behave themselves, the viscachas do not seem to worry in the slightest how crowded the warren gets. The viscachas’ artistic inclinations are, I feel sure, more than slightly influenced by surrealism. The area immediately around the mouth of the warren is cleared of every vestige of green stuff, so the front doors of the colony are surrounded by a ballroom-like expanse of earth, packed hard by the passing of many small feet. This bald patch in the middle of the pampa acts as their studio, for it is here that the viscachas arrange their artistic displays. The long, dry, hollow stems of the thistles are piled carefully into heaps, interspersed with stones, twigs, and roots. Anything else that catches the viscacha’s eye is added to this still-life to make it more attractive. Outside one vizcachera I examined the usual pile of twigs, stones, and thistle stems which was tastefully intermixed with several oil tin cans, three bits of silver paper, eight scarlet cigarette packets, and a cow’s horn. Somehow this whimsical display, arranged so carefully and lovingly out in the vast and empty pampa, made me feel a tremendous desire to meet a viscacha on his own ground. I could imagine the portly little animal, with its sad, striped face, squatting in the moonlight at the mouth of its burrow, absorbed in the task of arranging its exhibition of dried plants and other inanimate objects. At one time the viscacha used to be one of the commonest of the pampa animals, but his vegetarian habits and his insistence on clearing large areas of grass for holding his artistic displays got him into trouble with the agriculturists. So the farmers went to war, and the viscacha has been harried and slaughtered and driven away from most of his old haunts.

  We never caught a viscacha, nor, as I say, even saw one. It was the one member of the Argentine fauna that I most regretted not having met.

  Interlude

  We had been assured by the air company that once we had got our specimens to Buenos Aires we would be able to send them off to London within twenty-four hours. So, when our lorry reached the outskirts of the capital, I phoned the freight department to tell them we had arrived, and to ask them which was the best place at the airfield in which to house the animals for the night. With exquisite courtesy, they informed me that we would not be able to send the animals off for a week, and that there was nowhere on the airport to keep them. To be stranded in the middle of Buenos Aires with a lorry-load of animals and nowhere to keep them was, to say the least, a trifle disconcerting.

  Appreciating our predicament, the kindly lorry driver said that we might leave the animals in the lorry overnight, but that they would have to be removed first thing in the morning, as he had a job. Gratefully we accepted this offer, and, having parked our vehicle in the yard near his house, we set about the job of feeding the animals. Halfway through this operation Jacquie had an idea.

  ‘I know!’ she exclaimed triumphantly; ‘let’s phone the Embassy.’

  ‘You can’t phone an Embassy and ask them to put up your animals for a week,’ I pointed out. ‘Embassies aren’t provided for that sort of thing.’

  ‘If you phone Mr Gibbs he might be able to help,’ she persisted. ‘I think it’s worth trying, anyway.’

  Reluctantly, and much against my better judgement, I phoned the Embassy.

  ‘Hullo! You back?’ said Mr Gibbs jovially ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Yes, we had a wonderful time, thanks.’

  ‘Good. Did you catch much of the local fauna?’

  ‘Well, a fair amount. As a matter of fact that’s why I phoned you; I was wondering if you could help us.’

  ‘Certainly. What’s the trouble?’ asked Mr Gibbs unsuspectingly.

  ‘We want a place to put our animals in for a week.’

  There was a short silence at the other end, during which I presumed that Mr Gibbs was fighting a wild desire to slam down his receiver. But I had underestimated his self-control, for when he answered, his voice was suave and even, unruffled by the slightest trace of hysteria.

  ‘That’s a bit of problem. You mean you want a garden or something like that?’

  ‘Yes, preferably with a garage. Do you know of one?’

  ‘I don’t, off-hand. I’m not often asked to find . . . er . . . hotel accommodation for livestock, so my experience is limited,’ he pointed out. ‘However, if you come round and see me in the morning I may have thought of something.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ I said gratefully. ‘What time d’you get to the Embassy?’

  ‘Don’t come as early as that,’ said Mr Gibbs hastily. ‘Come round about ten-thirty. It’ll give me a chance to contact a few people.’

  I went back and related the conversation to Jacquie and Ian.

  ‘Ten-thirty is no good,’ said Jacquie. ‘The lorry driver’s just told us that his first job’s at six.’

  We sat in gloomy silence for some time, wracking our brains. ‘I know!’ said Jacquie suddenly.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I am not going to phone the Ambassador.’

  ‘No, let’s phone Bebita.’

  ‘Good Lord, yes! Why didn’t we think of it before?’

  ‘She’s sure to be able to find a place,’ said Jacquie, who seemed to be under the impression that everyone in Buenos Aires was adept at finding accommodation for wild animals at a moment’s notice. For the third time I went to the phone. The conversation that ensued was Bebita at her best.

  ‘Hullo, Bebita. How are you?’

  ‘Gerry? Ah, child, I was just talking about you. Where are you?’

  ‘Somewhere in the wilder outskirts of the city, that’s all I know.’

  ‘Well, find out where you are and come and have dinner!.’

  ‘We’d love to, if we may.’

  ‘B-b-but of course you may.’

  ‘Bebita, I really phoned to ask you if you could help us.’

  ‘Of course, child. What is it?’

  ‘Well, we’re stranded here with all our animals. Could you find somewhere for us to put them for a week?’

  Bebita chuckled.

  ‘Ahh!’ she sighed, in mock resignation, ‘what a man! You phone me at this hour to ask for shelter for your animals. Do you never think of anything else b-b-but animals?’

  ‘I know it’s an awful hour,’ I said contritely, ‘but we’ll be in a devil of a mess if we don’t find somewhere soon.’

  ‘Don’t despair, child. I will find somewhere for you. Ring me b-b-back in half an hour.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ I said, my spirits rising. ‘I’m sony to worry you with all this, but there’s no one else I can ask.’

  ‘Silly, silly, silly,’ said Bebita; ‘b-b-but naturally you must ask me. Good-bye.’

  Half an hour crept by, and then I phoned again.

  �
��Gerry? Well, I have found you a place. A friend of mine will let you keep them in his garden. He has a sort of garage.’

  ‘Bebita, you’re marvellous!’ I said enthusiastically.

  ‘B-b-but naturally,’ she said, chuckling. ‘Now, write down the address, take your animals round there, and then come here for dinner.’

  In high spirits we rattled through the twilit streets to the address Bebita had given us. Ten minutes later the lorry stopped, and peering out of the back I saw a pair of wrought-iron gates some twenty feet high, and behind them a wide gravel pathway stretched up to a house that looked like an offspring of Windsor Castle. I was just about to inform the lorry driver that he had brought us to the wrong house, when the gates were flung open by a beaming porter, who bowed our dilapidated vehicle in as though it had been a Rolls. Along one side of the house was a sort of covered veranda which, the porter informed us, was where we were to put our things. Feeling slightly dazed, we unloaded the animals. I still had a strong suspicion that it might prove to be the wrong house, but at least the animals were accommodated, so we hurried down the gravel path and out through the wrought-iron gates as quickly as possible, before the owner could turn up and start protesting. At her flat Bebita greeted us, calm, beautiful, and looking slightly amused.